President Obama will formally name Vice President Biden on Wednesday as the head of the administration's working group assigned to come up with ways to reduce gun violence following the Newtown, Conn., shootings.

The White House said Obama will make the announcement late Wednesday morning. Biden, a gun-control advocate during his years in the Senate, will supervise what the administration described as an "inter-agency" process to draw up a comprehensive strategy to address gun violence and the mass shootings that have battered a handful of communities during Obama's tenure.

White House officials say the eventual package of proposals will likely include some new restrictions on guns, particularly assault rifles, and high-capacity magazines. But they say it will also likely involve measures that touch on mental health initiatives and, perhaps, a discussion on the depiction of violence presented in popular culture.

#3
The O admin knows that this will be a fight. They do not want to get any mud on O, so they will let Biden spearhead the effort, and when things go south, Biden will be da man to focus on. You sure as sh*t can't have Holder be point man.....

#16
An interesting economic consequence of the fear that the govt will clamp down on guns is that prices have gone exponential, rising by 200-300% since the day before the attack on eBay. People are buying at their Wal-Mart stores and gun shops, so much so that they are running out of stock in many areas and selling for a tidy 3x profit. It should be mayhem for the next month.

And I mean absurd in the most literal sense. We all know that the U.S. tax code is riddled with "loopholes", exemptions and deductions intended to incentivize certain activities. Many of these are of dubious provenance and questionable utility. But, there is one that is particularly ridiculous. As in, how can this possibly be thought of as a loophole? But, to the technocrats in the federal government, the tax you don't have to pay on the value of rent you don't have to pay because you own your home is a loophole.

Read that last sentence again. Its called "The Imputed Net Rental Income on Owner-Occupied Housing" and the feds include it in their annual list of "tax expenditures." That term is how Washington officially refers to credits, deductions and exemptions. Here's how the federal government describes it:

Under the baseline tax system, the taxable income of a taxpayer who is an owner-occupant would include the implicit value of gross rental income on housing services earned on the investment in owner-occupied housing and would allow a deduction for expenses, such as interest, depreciation, property taxes, and other costs, associated with earning such rental income. In contrast, the Tax Code allows an exclusion from taxable in- come for the implicit gross rental income on housing services, while in certain circumstances allows a deduction for some costs associated with such income, such as for mortgage interest and property taxes.

#2
No. When the actions of government cause the fair market value of a property to drop, that is a "regulatory taking." A type of eminent domain under the 5th amendment, for which the government is required to pay just compensation.

But that assumes the government repects the rule of law, and is not a communist money-printing thugocracy.

#3
If you own your home out-right and don't have a mortgage at all, you would be "earning" $2,000 a month which the IRS thinks should be added to your taxable income.

While you have been paying Social Security for 49 years, you could have waited until age 70 to begin drawing Social Security. You however, elected to begin drawing your Social Securityentitlement at age 62. Therefore, your entitlement is reduced approximately 40%.

#4
Are they going to assess as implied income the difference between buying a new car, and the cost of keeping my current cheapass five-year-old Aveo on the road? Is my noninclination to buy dress clothes for work, and instead shop at Walmart, also a taxable implied event? How about my failure to buy cable TV? Eating in on cheap food instead of eating at a restaurant every night?

#6
Taxing the implied income of a home is actually Adam Smith capitalism.

You may not like it but it is.

Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground. More or less can be got for it according as the competitors happen to be richer or poorer, or can afford to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of ground at a greater or smaller expense. In every country the greatest number of rich competitors is in the capital, and it is there accordingly that the highest ground-rents are always to be found. As the wealth of those competitors would in no respect be increased by a tax upon ground-rents, they would not probably be disposed to pay more for the use of the ground. Whether the tax was to be advanced by the inhabitant, or by the owner of the ground, would be of little importance. The more the inhabitant was obliged to pay for the tax, the less he would incline to pay for the ground; so that the final payment of the tax would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent.

 Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 2, Article I: Taxes upon the Rent of Houses

#8
Bright Pebbles, I'm pretty sure that passage was about different ways of taxing property, and in particular, real estate property tax. Specifically, an endorsement of the land value or site valuation tax - a levy on the unimproved value of land. It's intended to encourage improvements by setting the cost of letting it lie fallow high.

But still and all, Smith and Henry George argued for an explicitly simple direct property tax scheme, not a involuted tax-expenditure accounting honeytrap built around income tax code.

I live in Pennsylvania, which already has a species of land value tax on the books. I probably pay *more* in mortgage, maintenance, and property taxes than I would to rent the same square footage in the same market as the townhouse I own. But the opportunity costs tied up in documenting that particular hypothesis to the satisfaction of some humorless IRS drone would not come cheap, relative to my modest income. And that sort of bureaucratic hoop-jumping crap is definitely not what the Georges and Smith intended.

[An Nahar] President Barack ObamaHow's it going, Sunshine?... on Tuesday threw his weight behind a bill to reintroduce a ban on civilians owning assault weapons, in the wake of a gun massacre in an elementary school that shocked the nation.That didn't involve assault weapons, from what I understand...
White House front man Jay Carney said the president would support a law proposed by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein to prohibit the arms, defined as certain types of semi-automatic firearm with removable magazines.

"He is actively supportive of, for example, Senator Feinstein's stated intent to revive a piece of legislation that would reinstate the assault weapons ban," Carney said, when asked what Obama would do about gun control.

Carney said Obama would also support any move to ban high-capacity clips -- magazines that hold dozens of rounds -- and close the so-called "gun show loophole" that allows unlicensed individuals to sell guns privately.

Feinstein vowed on Monday to bring the bill forward, telling CNN: "It's going to be strong, and it's going to be definitive. And it's going to ban by name at least 100 military-style semi-automatic assault weapons."

A previous ten-year ban on military-style assault weapons was allowed to expire in 2004, and many U.S. citizens have since rushed to arm themselves with semi-automatic versions of rifles like the Kalashnikov or the AR-15.

On Friday, a 20-year-old man used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle in an attack on a Connecticut elementary school, killing six staff and 20 children aged six or seven in a hail of high-velocity .223 rounds.

The slaughter has revived calls for stricter controls on arms in civilian hands, but Obama and Feinstein may encounter tough opposition from America's legions of shooting enthusiasts and a well-funded pro-gun lobby.

Obama has long supported a return of the assault weapons ban, but did nothing in his first term to put his own political muscle behind attempts to revive it.

America has suffered an epidemic of gun violence over the last three decades, including 62 mass shooting sprees since 1982, three of the deadliest in the second half of this year alone.

The vast majority of weapons used have been semi-automatic handguns or military-style assault weapons obtained legally by the killers.

There were an estimated 310 million non-military firearms in the United States as of 2009, one for each citizen. People in America are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than is someone in another developed country.

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.